Banned 50 years ago, exhibition reopens in Moscow

MOSCOW (AP) — Better known in the West for promising to “bury” the capitalist world, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev is also remembered by Russians for banning art that didn’t conform to the Communist Party’s notion that it should be straightforward, realistic and appeal to workers and peasants.

Visiting “The New Reality” exhibition in Moscow in December 1962, Khruschev got so enraged with what he saw that he shouted obscenities at the artists, promised to deport them from the Soviet Union and ordered the exhibition closed down.

Fifty years later, some of the banned canvases are on display again at the same Manezh hall – at a time when critics compare Khruschev’s ban to recent charges against the band Pussy Riot and artists whose paintings have angered the Kremlin and Russia’s dominant Orthodox Church.

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